You may remember Bottom’s Dream from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—“past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was–there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had, but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.”
Well, I thought the same might be said of the Republican Party, that there was no depth they would not descend to, if only Donald Trump told them to do so. But, clearly, I was wrong. Trump’s grotesque mistreatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, everyone’s favorite racist authoritarian xenophobe,1 has brought almost everyone on the right scrambling to Jeff’s defense. “You leave Jeff alone! He was hating foreigners when you were marrying them!”
More surprisingly, there’s been similar kickback to Trump’s most recent banality, his vicious attack on America’s transgender soldiers, an offensive undertaken, I would say, entirely to change the subject from you know, everything else Trump has been doing.
So, yeah, Republicans are showing some bottom. Unlike their leader, they aren’t entirely devoid of shame. They have a bottom. Of course, as that continuing farce in the Senate over the “repeal” of Obamacare shows, Republicans can sink a loooong way before hitting it.
Afterwords
Sen. John McCain’s impassioned speech on behalf of Mitch McConnell’s massive, and massively cynical, subversion of legislative practice—“Do as I say, not as I do”—reflects Establishment Republican hypocrisy. Republicans have been lying to their base for the past eight years and now they are turning those lies into legislation.
- The Washington Post’s Radley Balko, in an excellent column devoted to examining Sessions’ numerous bad ideas and hypocrisies, notes the following: “it’s uncanny how neatly Sessions’s support for or opposition to federalism seems to align in opposition to protection for minority groups. When a federal government policy offers more protection for a marginalized group, Sessions sings the praises of local control. When it’s the state or local government policy that affords them more protection, Sessions wants to impose federal law.” Just an old country boy. ↩︎
